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THE NAKED PATE OF THE BLACK-HEADED VULTURE LOOKS LIKE THAT OF the nine-banded armadillo. On this basis, the Mayas of Yucatan, Mexico say that when a vulture dies, it turns into an armadillo. They relate that a vulture on the brink of death will leave the roost and land by an armadillo's burrow. As it stands and waits, other vultures bring it food. Its feathers and wings gradually disappear, and in their place grows the scaly hide of an armadillo. Finally, the dying vulture comes back to life as a true armadillo and scurries down into its new burrow.
Here in the southern United States, we don't tell such fanciful stories about armadillos. To most of us, the armadillo is nothing more than a common species of roadkill with no mythological significance. Moreover, few of us know anything about the creature itself. How many Southerners know that the nine-banded armadillo is the only member of the edentates (i.e., animals without teeth, such as the aardvark and anteater) living in this country? Or that it is the only armored mammal in North America? How many people even know that the armadillo is a mammal and not a reptile? Or that it crossed the Rio Grande and entered Texas for the first time in the 1840s or 1850s?
Despite this ignorance, the citizens of Texas have managed to turn the armadillo into a cultural icon. During the 1970s, just a hundred years or so after armadillos first entered the Lone Star state as illegal aliens, armadillo images could be found on anything in Texas, including record covers, T-shirts, and beer commercials. This process of image making began several decades earlier, when the armadillo's long association with Texas caused it to enter the national consciousness as something peculiarly Texan. By mid-century, in fact, Americans were calling it the "Texas armadillo," even though the creature was overrunning other states, including Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Florida. Capitalizing on this association, the counterculture of Texas adopted the 'dillo as a symbol when it entered its psychedelic phase in the late 1960s and created an armadillo cult. Images of the armadillo proliferated, with commercial artists picking them up to use as motifs in advertising. The armadillo icon then spread like a virus throughout...